Sausage Hall

by Christina James

  When they’d arrived in the UK, the girls were vulnerable and completely dependent on the company. Some of them were very young and few could speak English. Most were also pretty in a waif-like, underfed sort of way. They were clearly attractive to men and Sentance had shelved his original plan to board them with any employees who were willing to take them and had instead boarded some with specially-selected employees, others in the caravan park on the edge of the town. None of the girls was officially employed by the company. They were treated as casuals, like gang women, and paid much lower rates than ‘real’ employees. They were offered the option of earning extra money ‘in other ways’. The supervisors had to have been in on it, of course, and probably Margaret Nugent as well. The extent to which the other employees realised what was going on was open to question. They were used to working alongside gang women and other casuals, so their innocence may have been genuine. What was not in doubt was that Sentance had set up a syndicate with the supervisors to enable them to make money from the girls’ immoral earnings.

  Although no-one was identified, the supervisors said that some of the clients were wealthy, influential local people. A few of the most promising girls were groomed for ‘special services’, which were usually supplied at the container ‘village’ that Andy Carstairs had stumbled upon. There was some talk of a more exclusive location that catered for the wealthiest and most privileged clients, but the supervisors were vague about this. They said that only Sentance knew about it. It flashed through Tim’s mind that the ‘special location’ could have been the cellar at Laurieston House. He thought of the vicious-looking hook on which Giash had injured himself. The hooks had been there for many years, perhaps since the time of the bankrupt butcher, but the furniture in front of them had been disturbed quite recently.

  The young woman who’d died had been one of the ‘special’ ones. None of the supervisors would admit to knowing how or why she’d died. On balance, Tim felt inclined to believe them. Thinking about Stuart Salkeld’s conjectures, Tim suspected that her death had been the result of a rough sex game that had gone wrong. The client had probably called Sentance in a panic and Sentance had more than likely told Harry Briggs to get rid of the body. Although the supervisors didn’t know the details, Harry was clearly in up to his neck and getting a substantial cut of the proceeds.

  There were many questions still to be answered. Most important and most urgent was the need to understand what happened to the women when they grew too old to be useful. The supervisors were unanimous in asserting that all those who’d been exploited were in their teens and twenties, yet this racket had been going on for at least ten years. There must have been a constant exodus of spent prostitutes, their numbers roughly matching the influx of new young women. Tim fervently hoped that when the girls grew ‘too old’ they’d been sent back to Eastern Europe, perhaps with some kind of gratuity to keep them quiet. The alternative would be too horrific to contemplate.

  Tim had yet to understand the nature or extent of Margaret Nugent’s role. It was unclear whether she, too, was making money out of Sentance’s exploits, though somehow Tim doubted it. He thought it more likely that she had some ‘extra’ covert relationship with Sentance, or alternatively was hoping for one. He guessed that Molly was in a similar position: it would explain the animosity of the two women towards each other.

  Finally, there were the passports. The supervisors claimed to have no detailed knowledge of how Sentance had forged the passports for the girls; they just knew that he’d done it. Tim was inclined to believe this, too, but it didn’t explain why the five partially-completed passports had been found in the cellar at Laurieston. Why would Sentance be concocting passports there, unless Kevan de Vries was involved in some way? Or Joanna de Vries, of course. Tim thought back to de Vries’ story about Archie and how he thought that Joanna might have continued to help other childless parents. If she and Sentance were working together to ‘import’ orphans, that could explain why the passports were being forged in her cellar. And Joanna de Vries had not wanted to go to St Lucia. Kevan de Vries had suggested, and Tim had accepted, that this was because she was reluctant to leave Archie, even though she didn’t want him to see her in the last stages of her illness, a reluctance that she’d overcome because the desire to hold him again had been stronger. But perhaps she’d had a further reason for returning. It would take many hours of police time to delve into all the illegal immigrant stuff. He suspected that if Sentance were not apprehended they would never get to the bottom of it.

  There was another question nagging away at him. How guilty was Kevan de Vries? As things stood, he could be accused only of bringing a child into the country without the correct papers: a venial sin, especially if he could produce evidence that that child was an orphan rescued from very disadvantaged circumstances. Tim had warmed a little to Kevan de Vries as he’d seen more of him and he certainly pitied the man for the loss of his wife and the many years of bearing the trauma of her illness that had preceded it. Something about him still didn’t quite ring true, even so. All of the crimes, from the break-in and discovery of the passports to the murder of Dulcie Wharton, had been played out against the backdrop of the de Vries empire and Kevan de Vries, its boss, was surely too shrewd an operator to have let all that happen unnoticed under his very nose. Several of the key events had actually happened in his house. Could he really be as innocent as he claimed? If the answer was yes, despite not usually having truck with superstition, Tim would be forced to conclude that ‘Sausage Hall’ was indeed jinxed.

  Harry Briggs’ van was apprehended by a police car on the A15, near Horncastle. A search of the van produced two holdalls, one packed with clothing and the other with £100,000 in twenties. He was carrying a one-way ticket for a foot-passenger on the Hull to Rotterdam overnight ferry. He was arrested, cautioned and taken to Spalding police station to be interviewed.

  Briggs demanded to be provided with a solicitor and would speak only when the latter had arrived. He denied any involvement in the deaths either of the woman whose body had been found in Sandringham woods or of Dulcie Wharton. He said that the money that he’d been carrying was to pay for materials for a ‘back pocket’ construction job that he’d been offered in the Netherlands. He refused to provide contacts to corroborate his story. He denied that he’d failed to tell his wife about his departure, saying that ‘she must have got confused’. When asked if he knew the whereabouts of Tony Sentance, he appeared to be extremely agitated, but would only answer: ‘No comment.’ Thereafter, this was his standard response to all of the questions that he was asked.

  Police road blocks on all the routes to all East coast ports and extensive searches carried out on vehicles and foot passengers at the ports themselves failed to reveal any trace of Tony Sentance.

  Fifty-Eight

  Two months had passed. Under further questioning, Alan revealed that the name of the girl in the woods at Sandringham was Ioana Sala. She’d been living at the caravan site, where she was known as Joanna Sale. That she had the same name as Kevan de Vries’ wife was an irony not lost on Tim Yates. When the police visited the caravan, they discovered two other girls living there. They took away Joanna’s hairbrush and some items of clothing, as well as a passport in her name. DNA tests on hairs from the hairbrush confirmed that the body in the woods was Joanna’s. The two girls, who were both very young, were taken into care by social services. Further enquiries and searches produced about twenty other girls, some living in caravans, some lodging with de Vries employees. All were in their teens or early twenties. Tim continued to hope that Sentance had devised some kind of repatriation scheme for the girls as they grew too old to be commercially useful, but Sentance had covered his tracks with almost preternatural efficiency. The police could find no trace of evidence relating to the girls or their clients, either at his house or at any of the de Vries plants. Margaret Nugent’s files held records only for the girls they had discovered. There was no f
older for Joanna Sale.

  Professor Salkeld had managed to detect fingerprints on the skin of both Joanna and Dulcie Wharton. They were an exact match with Harry Briggs’, which the police already had on record from minor crimes that he’d committed in the past. Briggs was charged with the two murders. Tony Sentance had still not been found: he seemed to have vanished into thin air. Tim spent many hours interrogating Briggs and told him repeatedly that he believed that Tony Sentance had masterminded the whole project. He pointed out that Sentance had deserted him and asked him why he was being loyal to the man who had betrayed him. If Briggs would help the police, they would ensure that his co-operation worked to his own advantage. On more than one occasion Briggs grew very agitated, but he continued to refuse to say a single word about Sentance. Finally Briggs’ solicitor stepped in and asked Tim not to harass his client.

  Tim and his colleagues began to prepare a case against the supervisors, but they knew it was flimsy. There was no evidence that they had kept a brothel. Although Tim was certain that they must have been in it for financial gain and therefore had been profiting from immoral earnings, he could find no evidence of unusual payments into their bank accounts. Sentance had taken money from several of the de Vries accounts and presumably used some of this to pay Harry Briggs, but Sentance’s own account also revealed no payments that couldn’t be explained. As for Margaret Nugent, on the face of it she was as clean as a whistle. It came as no surprise to Tim that her bank account, although containing substantial savings, was fed solely by her salary and unless he could prove that she had falsified or destroyed staff records, she was in the clear.

  The police had been stymied by a conspiracy of silence. The girls refused to testify against anyone. They didn’t seem to be afraid of the de Vries supervisors; their demeanour towards them was rather one of gratitude to the people who had helped them. They seemed not to understand that they had been exploited, degraded and their lives put in danger by these same people. Conversely, conditioned perhaps by their experiences in their mother country, they showed to the police nothing but implacable hostility and defiance. Tim knew that he would have to prosecute them for travelling on false passports and that this would probably mean that they’d be deported, but that in itself seemed a very hollow victory. He would be forced to turn the victims into criminals.

  He had no proof that the supervisors were involved in the passport forgeries and indeed he believed them when they said that they weren’t. He was convinced that Sentance alone had engineered the forgeries, probably assisted by a professional forger who had long since melted back into London or one of the world’s other great anonymising metropolises.

  They had to arrest Sentance in order to make further progress. But where was he? In the whole of his career, Tim had rarely felt so frustrated.

  Fifty-Nine

  Juliet stood in the chapel of the crematorium at Boston, her head bowed, as the three coffins were carried in. It was a very small congregation. Besides herself, there were two other representatives from South Lincs police, Giash Chakrabati and Verity Tandy. Katrin, now visibly pregnant, was also there, as well as Dr Louise Butler and Nick Brodowski. Juliet was grateful because she knew that the reason for the presence of all three was that they had come to support her. They knew how much she had invested in finding out who the dead black women were. Like her, they were also there to show respect for these victims of abuse who had died in unknown horrific circumstances so long ago.

  Somewhat unexpectedly, Jackie Briggs had also crept into the chapel shortly before the service was due to begin. Juliet guessed that she’d come as the self-appointed representative of Laurieston House. She’d known that Kevan de Vries would not attend. He and Archie had left for the other Laurieston, the one in St Lucia, about a week before, but he’d made it clear that he would not have come even if he’d still been resident at ‘Sausage Hall’.

  They had been obliged to opt for a humanist funeral because no-one knew for sure which religion the three women had practised. However, Juliet knew that if she was right about who had ‘owned’ them, it was likely that they’d been brought up as Christians, so she’d asked an Anglican minister to give one of the readings. He and the humanist officiant brought the total number of mourners to nine, not counting the undertaker’s men. Tim Yates had hoped to be present, but a few days previously Stuart Salkeld had released Joanna Sale’s body and, by coincidence, her funeral had been arranged to take place at Peterborough Crematorium on the same day. Tim had decided to attend in the slim hope that the other mourners might offer him some further clue about how to find Tony Sentance.

  Juliet had chosen the order of the service. She’d gone for simple, mainly secular music: Morning Has Broken and Wonderful World, but she’d decided to conclude with Amazing Grace. She’d been convinced that the women would have liked it. She’d followed her hunch that they’d have been dismayed not to have some Christian element included. For the same reason, she chose Walter de la Mare’s Silver and Keats’s Ode to Autumn for the two of the readings, but had asked the clergyman to give the 23rd Psalm as the third.

  Perhaps it was because she’d been so ill, perhaps because she’d had a small but terrifying glimpse of the atrocities that must have gone on at Laurieston House a century or so before and had imagined the unknown details all the more vividly, that she felt consumed with grief. The tears rolled down her cheeks, unstoppable. Katrin, who was standing next to her, caught hold of her hand. Nick Brodowski, on her other side, awkwardly patted her arm. The experience was yet more harrowing because, in the absence of any other information, each of the three women had been given an identical name: Louisa Jameson. It was as if their very identity, every trace of their individuality, had been stripped from them as a result of the barbarous treatment they had suffered.

  She hadn’t wanted them to be cremated, but the local authority had been obliged to bear the brunt of the costs (South Lincs police had also made a contribution) and it was the authority’s practice always to choose cremation in such cases unless there was a very good reason for incurring the extra expense of a burial. She’d made a tentative approach to Kevan de Vries to see if he would be prepared to contribute, but he’d made it clear that the idea appalled him. In some odd, superstitious way he seemed to think that the undetected presence of the three skeletons in his cellar had been at the root of all his misfortunes. He hadn’t even considered it appropriate to send wreaths: each of the coffins had borne just one modest wreath, these also paid for by the police.

  One by one, the curtains closed round the coffins. Juliet had always hated this part of the cremation ceremony, considering it to be ghoulish and theatrical, qualities that were even more exaggerated when the identical procedure took place three times in quick succession.

  Afterwards, the small group filed out slowly to the strains of Amazing Grace. As they emerged into the crematorium’s small courtyard, they were enveloped in a burst of golden sunlight. It was far fiercer than usual for the time of year. Juliet felt her spirits lift. She felt as if she’d been sent a sign, some token of approval, from the deceased, perhaps even a message that they had been liberated from their dreadful limbo at last.

  Nick Brodowski drew her quietly to one side.

  “Well done,” he said. “I know what this has cost you, but you’ve seen it through perfectly. It makes me very proud . . .”

  Juliet’s head jerked up sharply. She wasn’t ready for such proprietorial behaviour. He read her mood instantly.

  “. . . to be your friend.” He finished lamely. He took hold of her arm again. “You must be exhausted. And I’ve been working away from home, so I’ve not been able to drop in much lately. I’m sorry for that. If you’re not too tired, would you like to come for dinner this evening?”

  “I . . .” Juliet glanced beyond his solid bulk and saw that Louise Butler had been standing close by. Now Louise turned suddenly on her heel and walked rapidly away. Juliet longed
to run after her, to ask her to wait, but she hesitated and the moment passed. It wasn’t in her nature to cause a scene or draw attention to herself, especially on this solemn occasion. She watched as Louise negotiated the next funeral cortège as it lumbered through the gates before marching on towards the car park.

  “I think I am a bit too tired, to be honest, Nick,” she said. “I’ve only been back at work for a couple of weeks and it’s still taking it out of me. But thanks, all the same. It was a very nice idea.”

  Nick shrugged.

  “No matter. Some other time, then. I’d best be getting back to work. Take care.”

  Juliet nodded. “Thank you for coming,” she called softly after his retreating back. If he heard her, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  “Who was that?” said Katrin, coming to stand beside her. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before.” Her curiosity was almost palpable.

  “Oh, that was Nick, my neighbour,” said Juliet. She tried to sound casual, but she knew that the lump in her throat was putting a strain on her voice. “You must have heard me talk about him. He’s the one who found me after I collapsed.”

  “Mm, yes, I do remember now,” said Katrin. “He seems very keen on you.” Her eyes twinkled.

  “Nonsense!” said Juliet. “He was just being kind, that’s all.”

  She hoped that Katrin had not noticed Louise Butler, or seen her walk off without a word. Without trying to analyse her feelings, she knew that this was the real reason that she was still upset. She was relieved that Katrin didn’t mention it, though she knew that this might just have been tact on her part. Not much escaped Katrin’s observant gaze.

  Sixty

  The last few weeks have worked out better than I could have wished for in my wildest dreams. The police have accepted I had no part in the death of the girl at Sandringham. They’ve said they believe Sentance was responsible for the passport forgeries but that they can’t build a case until they’ve found him. Professor Salkeld has said that although Joanna was certainly moved after she died, it could have been me when I was trying to revive her – I would have been so distressed that I wouldn’t have realised what I was doing at the time. (I doubt it!) He’s sceptical, after all, that anyone else was with her in the cellar when she died. (I’m convinced he’s wrong, but I’ll have my own way of dealing with that.)